How to Persuade Teenagers (and Adults!) to Read Challenging Texts
What are the pleasures of reading, and how will anyone enjoy them in the digital age?
by Matt Bardin, Zinc Learning Labs Founder and CEO
When I was a kid, my parents explained how 19th-century sailors ate no fruits and vegetables and got scurvy. I wondered about my teeth falling out as I forced down mandatory carrots.
Most parents and educators I meet use that scurvy logic to promote reading. You’d better read books to make you smarter, more worldly, more empathic—to get into college, land a higher-paying job, a better career…
All of these things are true, but please stop. It’s not working.
Put simply, only one valid motivation exists for reading: pleasure.
Certainly reading entertains and transports us. A used, paperback thriller, mystery, or even historical fiction has more narrative, escapist bang for your buck than any movie or TV show (especially if it’s 800 pages long!). The information density in books compared with, say, podcasts or videos, delivers a much deeper pleasure in learning—of becoming better informed about anything from invertebrates to investing.
Beyond just facts, however, great texts open and build out new regions in the mind. The best writing materializes new ways of seeing, thinking about, and understanding the world in a kind of thrilling mental homecoming. Yes, that makes sense. I’ve been here before. Well, no I haven’t. But now I’m here. And I belong. Given that language is the operating system for our brains, sometimes the words and syntax themselves deliver that profoundly satisfying expansiveness.
Okay, wait a minute. All of that isn’t quite scurvy or rickets, but anyone with a smartphone, much less those of us trying to influence teenagers, knows the long list of digital treats barring the path between our brains and books. In my childhood home, no kid chose a piece of fruit while a single cookie remained in the cupboard. How can we expect anyone to read when reels, clips, and heart-stopping explosions call to us from our pockets?
Technology succeeds by making things easier. Tech’s highest, most lucrative achievement, our online existence, transfixes us with a constantly refreshing torrent of novel stimuli requiring less and less effort. Before picking up a static, paper book with no pictures, we must choose NOT to watch a movie, TV show, sports highlights, how-to videos, or up-to-the-minute influencers. We must opt out of shorter, newer news articles and the infographics and video clips that increasingly accompany them, much less tweets, posts, stories, reels… Mark Zuckerberg must have felt like a genius for acquiring Instagram—until TikTok came along with faster cuts and a better algorithm.
In this environment, isn’t reading higher-level texts, including books, poetry, essays, and scientific studies pretty much over? An esoteric art for a shrinking cohort of nerds and their descendants?
No. Not at all. Every parent and increasingly most kids know that living online robs us of something essential. Reading, especially on an adult level—a profound pleasure that has never reached more than maybe 15% of the population, solves one of the biggest problems in our digital lives and, therefore, finally has the chance to become ubiquitous.
The internet has killed advanced reading the way the tractor ended physical effort. When technology eradicated manual labor from most lives, many people became sedentary, but, within a short few decades, hundreds of millions began voluntarily exercising.
That’s about to happen much faster with reading, and the change will be led not by older adults but by millennials and teens.
The ease of the internet disempowers. It feeds us endless novelties, but, as the scientist in Jurassic Park watching his zoo animal devour a goat observes, “T-rex doesn’t wanna be fed. He wants to hunt.” Effortful reading restores and rejuvenates. It’s our most interactive media—an act of collaborative creation between reader and writer that connects us across cultures and eras.
Digital tech’s success contains the seeds of our screens’ demise. They suck us in. Their tricks work. Yes, I do want to learn about these other products that match my past purchases! Just one more football/basketball/soccer/hockey/baseball highlights video won’t take that long. And, yeah, I do “need to know” about another outrageous thing perpetrated by opponents of my political side! No one emerges from a day/afternoon/evening spent on a screen feeling refreshed, but teens and millennials are on another level.
Raised on first Snapchat and Instagram and now TikTok, they coined the term “brainrot” to describe the negative side effect. Before I was born, my dad had a three-pack-a-day smoking habit. He lit the next one off the dying embers of the last. That’s about where many teens stand with regard to their phones. Unlike their peers even five or ten years ago, the current generation knows they have a problem—a minimally pleasurable, soul-shrinking addiction. I never saw my dad smoke. He quit when he could no longer stand the hacking cough he woke up to every day. Online adolescence has brought an entire generation to an anxiety/depression precipice that has them ready to gnaw through their digital cage, and reading offers a powerful antidote
The greatest pleasure of reading may be the effort itself. Unlike almost everything on our screens, reading places non-trivial demands on our minds. The words live on a static page with no sounds or pictures, much less video. Our brains must do the heavy lifting of converting letters into imagined sounds and then, as we “hear” them in our heads, connecting those words with images, ideas, and experiences. For several thousand years, writers have attempted to put whatever lightning they feel in the bottle of poems, essays, plays, and books. None of these has any meaning or value though without the brains of readers working to construct them.
That simple abracadabra—our minds’ reanimating of the stored energy of words—can feel good when we read the cereal box. Certain texts, some sacred, some profane, have a mysterious protean power to reward our exertions with fresh manifestations every time we return to them, like fresh buds on some immortal bush. Every time we work the levers of our brains to experience those words, we find more and still more flowers for the bees…
If we see reading only as entertainment or a source of information, digital options preempt it. But the cognitive load—the effort required to sound out words and then form them into meanings in the mind—makes reading so much more meaningful as streaming algorithms capture our attention and delete our agency.
Are we all ready for this kind of rigorous brain workout routine? Probably. Young people definitely are, but they will need catalysts—supportive peers and adults who help them find the energy to start the reaction. Maybe we all will. In any case, here are the steps anyone wanting this cure will need to take:
Step 1: Desire. There’s a crucial difference between wanting to do something beneficial and doing it (and maybe an even bigger difference between doing it once and getting in the habit of doing it), BUT the inner spark that can kindle action needs nurturing and acknowledgement, even when no action gets taken. Sometimes just the impulse needs to happen hundreds of times before any deed. Discuss the benefits of reading but expect nothing. Look for the sparks but with honest curiosity about their experience. If you’re a parent, you may need a tutor, teacher, or relative to catalyze this first step, as anything you say may curdle instantly into conflict or pressure, thereby cooking the seeds.
Step 2: Choice. Do you want to read fantasy? Historical fiction? Classics? Philosophy? Mysteries? Do you want to learn about science, nature, or investing? You’re hunting that first, breakthrough reading pleasure. If you are a reader trying to get your students or children to read, perhaps you know what they would love. Suggest it. But respect the sanctity of their autonomy. There are tens of thousands of “great” texts to read, but it only matters what they think. If they want to read comic books or vampire romances, that’s fine. Just be ready with heartier fare when Captain Underpants loses its luster. And no point in continuing to read anything that’s not grabbing them.
Step 3: Build an off switch. Eventually, a great book will pull you away from your screens (and keep you blissfully away for hours!). But how to start? As they say in AA, the mind leads. Your lizard brain will always want to watch another video. Freedom begins when you don’t—when you find and practice tripping the override. Even if you don’t immediately pick up a book, creating a mental off switch for your devices is a non-negotiable baby step towards self-restoration.
Step 4: Reading is “Zinc-ing.” We made up that word to describe the imagination’s conversion of text to images, ideas, meanings, and experiences. The mind likes that effort. Even reading, “Springfield is the capital of Illinois” feels good if you let your brain enjoy those words. You’ve probably never been there, but what an odd thing to say. “Spring” and “field” are a pleasure, but what a generic and weird name for a city and how uncanny to juxtapose the fun sounds of the strangely spelled “Illinois,” first, if you happen to know them, with the devastating connotations of French colonists, cultural erasure, and genocide, and then secondly with the utter blandness of this sentence. Of course, you probably won’t bring all that consciousness to this sentence the way you might if you were reading “Hope is the thing with feathers,” but readers enjoy reading. The process is the same.
Step 5: Commit to ten pages. Habituated as we are to less-effortful stimuli, actually applying Step 4 above to a new text involves resistance. My initial reaction to pretty much every book I read—even those I end up loving—is, Well, this is boring. Paradoxically, the most rewarding voices on the page confront us with new patterns that take getting used to. Give yourself ten pages of concerted Zinc-ing. If you’re not with the writer after ten pages, move on. Go to the library or a bookstore. There are too many great things to read to waste more effort, but fighting through that first layer rewards you even if you put the book down.
If you’re trying to help someone who says they HATE reading, be compassionate and understanding. They’re probably not very good at it. Sure, they can “read”—meaning sound out the letters, but they may be scanning quickly for information or expecting the novel you gave them to sweep them away like their favorite TV show does. Not gonna happen. At least not till they know how to enjoy the effort.
If you or someone you know can help them discover that pleasure, they will come around. Yes, it involves effort, but the internet is making our teeth fall out.
You can follow Matt on Substack: https://substack.com/@mattbardin2.
